The nonprofit Greening of Detroit
estimated in 2013 that between 1,500 and 2,000 urban gardens were being
maintained within the city limits, like this one pictured. Here,
tomatoes are grown in the backyard of an abandoned house.

Photo by Florian Buettner/Laif/Redux

Detroit’s secret weapon against food insecurity

DETROIT – Since the 2008 financial collapse, food banks around the country have been slammed with record demand for emergency food services, brought on by historically elevated levels of food insecurity.
Detroit is an exception, but not because the city is better off
than most; instead, the main food bank here has been overwhelmed by
soaring levels of hunger for so long, it has no way of measuring rising
demand.
“A lot of the way our food distribution works is
dependent on what we get in versus what’s needed, because the amount of
need is always greater than the food that we have,” said Gerry Brisson,
president of Gleaners Community Food Bank.
Brisson’s food bank serves five Michigan counties, with a
combined population of about 4.2 million people, according to U.S.
Census Bureau. But Brisson estimates that Detroit, which by last count
had fewer than 700,000 residents, eats up about half of the food bank’s
supply.
“That’s probably a byproduct of poverty more than
any other thing,” said Brisson. In other words, although it could be
difficult to measure the exact level of hunger in Detroit, there is no
question that the troubled city has been wracked by food insecurity for a
long time. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as lack of access to “enough food for an active, healthy life.”

“Basically, we’re on the ground organizing”Kadiri Sennefer of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network

Rather than waiting for help that might never arrive, some locals
have been at work organizing their own response. Detroit may be one of
the hungrier cities in the United States, but in recent years it has
also become the country’s urban agriculture capital. The nonprofit
Greening of Detroit estimated in 2013 that between 1,500 and 2,000 urban gardens
were being maintained within the city limits. Some of these gardens are
there just for the purposes of beautification, but many of them exist
to feed people who would not otherwise have access to fresh produce.
Groups like the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN)
combine urban farming with community organizing. In the words of DBCFSN
compost manager and Detroit native Kadiri Sennefer, the food security
network works toward “uprooting racism, and planet justice.”
“Basically, we’re on the ground organizing,” he said during a panel
on Detroit’s food insecurity at the liberal conference Netroots Nation
earlier this month.
DBCFSN runs several farmers markets within the city limits and
operates D-Town Farm, where volunteers can farm the land in exchange for
produce or other goods.
The group also lobbies the city on food policy and worked to establish the Detroit Food Policy Council in
2008. Other large farms have stayed away from overt political
organizing, instead focusing mainly on agriculture and education.
But many of the city’s gardens – perhaps even the “vast majority,” according to Tepfirah
Rushden, who works with the group Greening of Detroit and also sat on
the Netroots panel – are so-called guerrilla gardens, farmed on land the
gardeners do not legally own.
Sennefer described guerrilla gardening as a “necessity,” given
the amount of un-utilized land in Detroit and the difficulty which
low-income communities tend to have in acquiring it for their own
purposes.
“It’s not like we’re striving to bypass the law,” he said
during the panel. “But at the same time, the way the system is set up,
we will never get anything done if we wait for someone to give us the OK
to do something.”
There’s still quite a bit of hunger in Detroit, and urban
agriculture alone probably won’t relieve it. So far, the produce coming
from the city’s urban gardens has done more to supplement other food
sources than replace them.
Gleaners Community Food Bank has even started its own community
garden, producing between 20,000 and 30,000 pounds of fresh produce per
year, but Brisson says he doesn’t expect those efforts to measurably
bring down hunger in Detroit.
“I see it as less about reducing demand for food and more about
systemtically getting people to think differently about the kinds of
food that are available and the kinds of food they want to eat,” he
said.
Researchers from Rutgers University, the Urban Agricultural
Network and the Southside Community Land Trust have found that urban
agriculture may help improve health outcomes, but thus far nobody has attempted to turn urban agriculture into the primary food source for a major U.S. city.
Yet it’s clear that urban agriculture hasn’t yet reached capacity. Around the country, other food banks are starting up community gardens of their own in
an attempt to get more fresh produce to needy families. If other cities
experience an economic collapse similar to Detroit’s, the nationwide
urban farming infrastructure may grow yet further.